Grandson of enola gay pilot
crew made a run over Japan in a B-29 Superfortress named the Bockscar. It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire."Īfter the Enola Gay flight, the Japanese did not lay down arms.Three days later, another U.S. The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge. He later said of the blast: "If Dante had been with us on the plane, he would have been terrified. But he said he had no clear idea of the bomb's potential besides the description that it would explode with the force of 20,000 tons of dynamite, a concept he could only vaguely grasp. Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists and military leaders working on the Manhattan Project. Leading to the bombing, Tibbets had meetings with J. The crew carried an atomic bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" that devastated Hiroshima, a city chosen because it was a military center and had no prisoner-of-war camps. The Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress he named after his mother, took off from Tinian Island, near the Pacific island of Guam, in the pre-dawn hours of Aug. Tibbets was selected for the top-secret bombing mission over Japan, the culmination of the Manhattan Project, because of the piloting skill he showed early in the war during bombing runs over Europe and North Africa. "It would have been morally wrong if we'd have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die," he said. In a public television documentary, The Men Who Brought the Dawn, which aired on the 50th anniversary of the bombings, Tibbets said the bomb "saved more lives than we took" because an alternative would have been an invasion of Japan's home islands.
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He said he had no regrets over the more than 100,000 Japanese killed or injured at Hiroshima and made a point of saying he slept easily at night knowing of his role. Tibbets became a military celebrity with the Aug. He reportedly had had strokes in recent years. Tibbets Jr., who piloted the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb in combat - on Hiroshima, Japan - a mission that helped end World War II, died Thursday at his home in Columbus, Ohio.